Comment by charlieirish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlieirish | Hacker News Reader

I've been having fun the last few months by creating and launching! The latest of which seems to have struck a chord: MailScope

http://www.mailscope.io adds profile data to your existing mailing list. Why? Well, if you don't ask for firstname and lastname on signup, you'll get increased conversion. But if you then want to get increased open and click rates when you actually send email, you should start personalizing (one way is to use firstnames in the body) and segmenting. That's where MailScope comes in. Each new subscriber you get, MailScope will automatically add firstname, lastname (and other profile data).

It's just the start and I've been having great fun expanding the possibilities - alerting you when an 'influencer' signs up so that you can reach out directly; auto-following subscribers on twitter when they signup. I've already got a dozen or so paying customers who use MailScope to enrich their mailing lists and increase their revenues. It's awesome to have learnt so much here on HN and finally be able to start offering something of real value back to business owners.

Interesting product. Good luck.

I had similar ideas about automatically enriching subscriber / profiler data but ended up not following them any further because behaviour like this is slightly creepy and might put subscribers off.

From your experience how do you alleviate such concerns? Is there a target audience? For instance, people subscribing to industry newsletters professionally might be less privacy-minded than say people interested in information technology subjects.

One way to alleviate this concern is to know your audience and not sign up for a product like Mailscope if your audience is privacy-minded.

Interesting idea how do you get the names? My initial idea would be to crawl some social networks for the name.

Not the guy but on the site it says "We search hundreds of different data sources including public databases, private APIs and social networks. We can accurately match over one billion email addresses to firstname and lastname."

Clearbit could be one of the solutions to this.

Really cool project.

Which other data fields do you offer besides names if any? zip? gender? age?

And what would be the price difference between name and any other fields?

Neat idea, good luck with it!

Why not list pricing?

Maybe pre-launch and pricing not figured out yet?

He mentions that he just started working on it, so he could be in some sort of private beta.

Interesting idea - but what are your pricing plans?

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